Understanding the Onset of Vernacular Reorganisation

From the start of February 2022, I have been working as a Post Doctoral Fellow on the project Understanding the Onset of Vernacular Reorganisation (20-UOC-064), with Lynn Clark as principal investigator.

In collaboration with the Child Welbeing Research Institute, we are building a transcribed audio corpus of children retelling a story (including Hana and the Tūī, pictured) in their own words at multiple time points.

Currently, we are investigating the application of forced alignment techniques with childrens speech, comparing multiple available techniques against segments which have been manually aligned.

Once the corpus is constructed, we will explore the assumption that children’s speech departs from the adult model at age 5, and accelerates into a period of reorganization.